Gothic fiction; Guardian and ward -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Before long, a servant knocked at the door, and announced that my room
was ready. Then succeeded a pleasant bustle and excitement incident to
my removal to it. Kitty insisted upon considering me a perfectly
helpless invalid, and would have carried me, if I had not remonstrated,
and Mrs. Roberts had not sneered at the idea. As it was, she wrapped me
up so that I could hardly move, and supporting me with her arm, preceded
by Mrs. Roberts, we crossed the hall, and stopped at the door of the
apartment assigned to me.
"Oh, what a pretty room!" I exclaimed, as we entered it. Kitty was
charmed that I liked it, and proceeded with great satisfaction to do the
honors. Wheeling toward me an easy-chair, and settling me in it before
the bright fire that blazed on the hearth, she said with animation:
"Isn't it a pretty room, miss? I've always said, that though the others
were bigger and finer, there wasn't one that had such a sweet pretty
look about it as the blue room had. It's just fit for a young lady like
you."
Kitty was not wrong about its being a pretty room; I never saw a
prettier myself. It was not large, but well-proportioned and airy.
Opposite the door there was a bay window, with white curtains trimmed
with blue, and the same at the other two windows. The bed at the end of
the room stood in a recess, curtained in the same manner. The walls were
papered with a delicate blue paper, the wood-work about the room was
oak, and all the furniture was oak and light blue. The carpet, which was
in itself a study, was an arabesque pattern of oak upon a light-blue
ground. The slender vases on the mantel, the pictures in their carved
oak frames, had an inexpressible charm for eyes so long accustomed to
the bare walls and wooden presses of a boarding school dormitory. And
even to a maturer taste, I think it would have been pleasing; for I do
not remember ever to have seen a room more entirely in keeping, and in
which there was less out of place and inharmonious. Indeed, this
impression was so strong, that I involuntarily begged Kitty to put away
my dark plaid shawl, the sight of which, upon the delicate blue sofa,
annoyed me exceedingly; and I thought with satisfaction of a certain
blue morning dress in my trunk, that I could put on to-morrow, by way of
being in keeping with the room. And the white lava pin and earrings,
Agnes' parting gift, which I had never worn yet, and admired beyond
expression, would come in play exactly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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